Sermon: Before Voting

The Monster Raving Loony Party has published its manifesto. It calls for 'traffic cops who are not intelligent enough to cope with proper police work' to be 're-trained as vicars'. Please don't ask me what I used to do before I was ordained. Instead, let me ask you a question: listen carefully. How are you going to vote? I don't mean which party will you vote for, but in what spirit will you cast your vote, with what conviction? G.K. Chesterton said that the depressing thing about elections is not that only half the electorate take part, but that only half the elector takes part, half-heartedly with a sigh and a shrug of the shoulder, not believing that we can make any real difference to our national life.

A modern democracy is a long way from the golden age of Athens in the 5th century BC, when Pericles, one of the most intelligent rulers the world has known, achieved a democratic polis in which the watchwords were participation, law, freedom and equality. It was by no means a perfect society by today's standards; yet the vision has remained compelling ever since. At its heart lies the privilege and duty of citizenship. And citizenship, which includes exercising our democratic right to vote, is one way in which we publicly live out our Christian vocation. What is required of us is to be as obedient to God in public life and politics as we are in our personal journey of faith. In this morning's gospel, Jesus says: 'If you love me, you will keep my commandments.' He has already spelled out what this means in washing his disciples' feet and giving the great mandatum of Maundy Thursday: 'I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.' Following Jesus is an act of love. So politics, at its best, is about love too, and so is our participation in it as citizens. We vote out of love for God and our neighbour.

St. John tells us that love is not a sentimental dream but a choice. In one of his letters he develops this great upper room theme. 'Those who say, “I love God” and hate their brothers or sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, how can they love God whom they have not seen?' My own love, so self-serving, giving as little as I can get away with, how unlike the way God loves with the price of his own life, emptying himself, costing not less than everything. The only way of loving is to learn it the way God has. If we can't contemplate it, then Christianity has not yet become real for us. And maybe voting is a bit like dying: we vote and we die as we have tended to live, for life is of a piece. If we are self-centered in our living, we shall be self-centered in our dying and in our voting. But if we are generous in our living, we shall probably die contented and we shall certainly vote with a wider concern that merely our own. We can vote narrowly for what we think will benefit us individually or benefit our nation at the expense of the wider world. Or we can vote with a larger vision of what will benefit others and be for the good of us all in the end. We can vote out of love.

Once, a clever lawyer asked Jesus a question. 'Who is my neighbour?' Jesus' answer should leave us in no doubt as to whom we should especially have on our hearts on election day. Up to now the campaign has not had much to say about making poverty history, helping the developing nations in their spiralling need. Today, World Poverty Day, it is good to know that the leaders of all three main political parties will at last be making global poverty a keynote theme. But we need to hear more. We need to hear about climate change which may possibly have become irreversible in two or three elections' time, and whose first victims will be the poorest peoples of the world who are least able to defend themselves against rising sea levels, failing crops and land-hunger. We need to hear about Europe, human rights, peace-making, trade justice, even if these are not vote-winning issues on the streets of Britain.

I am not at all saying that domestic issues do not matter. Health, education, public order, how our taxes are spent, these are all matters of legitimate concern to each of us. But I want to question the easy rhetoric of self-interest we hear so much of at election time. It should make us wonder what has happened to our society with its great British traditions of tolerance and generosity, ask whether we have any fund of core values left that could help us build a world that is more compassionate, more generous, more just. The churches must bear some responsibility for this worrying collapse of any real vision for a renewed society with a sense of common purpose. Our present preoccupations as a communion do not make for a witness to the gospel that is turned outward to the world in the way that the love of God always is. When religion declines into 'what a man does with his own solitude', as one philosopher put it, when the issues of public faith are no longer transacted in the pulpit and at the altar, we have wandered a long way from the kind of Christianity the New Testament knows about and asks us to imitate in our time.

This eucharist offers us a different vision. Here, in bread and wine, we play at what it is to be a kingdom in which all the human barriers of gender, race, class, educational or political difference are abolished. But then, having imagined and acted out this kingdom, having been fed at the table at which all are fed, where none are sent away with nothing, and none are fed too much, we cannot be at peace with ourselves until those same realities become true in our society and our world. What I am asking is that we do not forget the eucharist as we exercise our citizenship, join in the election debate, share our vision for our country and go to the polls. I am asking that we do not forget Jesus' broken body and shed blood. I am asking that we do not forget God and our neighbour. I am asking that we do not forget his commandments.

Serendipitiously, voting day, Thursday 5 May, is Ascension Day. On that day we celebrate the reign of the exalted Christ over all things and give voice to our longing and prayer that God's kingdom may come, his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. What better day to play our part in choosing those who will govern in our name? What better day to demonstrate a Christian vision for our world? Alan Ecclestone said that what matters for prayer is what we do next. Maybe the same is true of voting. It is what we do next, how we play our part in bringing love and truth and goodness to our world that is just as important. It is little enough, our vote, this throwing our offering into God's treasury like a widow's mite. But the prophet warns us not to despise the day of small things. In tiny acts of faithfulness the risen Jesus is disclosed as the Way, the Truth and the Life for all humanity. And if we take the whole of ourselves into this election, give it all our conviction, all our prayer, all our hope - this will make all the difference.